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Timothy’s Alternative MCU Running Order

Good evening movie watching people everywhere. It is I, Timothy the Talking Cat, editor, writer, gourmand, and counselour of the cinematic arts. Was it not the great Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès himself who once said “Sacre-bleu a talking cat! If only I had ze talking pictures I could make a film of this but instead I stick this rocket in somebody’s eye!” Yes, yes, I speak French now as well because I am a great linguist among other things. As Noam Chomsky wrote to me only the other day in reply to my letter about the intrinsic nature of grammar in the feline brain: “Please cease and desist from any attempt to contact me again.” That’s one of his famous sentences that are technically grammatical but don’t make sense.

All the truly great films are very long and the great film experiences are so long that they have to have an interval. Consier this:

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: has an interval and an overture.

Warcraft the Movie: does not have an interval or an overture.

Case closed I think. The Marvel Cinematic Cosmos does not have intervals but it does have breaks between films so you can go and pee. You can just have a pee in the cinema if you bring your own litter tray but some cinemas frown on this practice as they want you to spnd the extra money buying abig tub of popcorn so you can pee in that instead.

The point I’m trying to make is that I need the toilet.

…

That’s better. Typing on a full bladder is not wise even when you are getting somebody else to do the typing.

LENGTH! Length is a key factor here. If you go see a short movie then Camestros has to pay the same amount as when he takes you to a LONGGGG movie. You get more movie for your money. But length is not enough. You also need:

Explosions

Vampires

Space

Exploding vampires in space

Cats

The important element of Marvel films is not just that they are long and have pee breaks between films (sometimes lasting several years) but each film is an improvement on the last. Have we reached peak Marvel film yet? Oh no, not by a long chalk matey! That’s not how a shared universe works. You introduce pieces piece by pieces until you have all the pieces and WHAM perfect film probably with an interval like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

So here’s my running order of Marvel films in the order you should watch them.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – The Iron Man/Potts origin story. This is where the whole story starts and frankly it is a classic. They’ve been mapping this all out since 1910 or whenever this film was made.

Blade 1: Vampires! Not in space but they don’t play all their best cards in one go. I tried that once in a fancy casino and they all got very cross with me. “You can’t bring your own cards” they shouted and “This is not a game of Uno!”

Balde 2: More vampires. Keep playing the good cards not the best card. Like the ‘reverse direction’ card not the Uno wild card.

Blade 3: Even more vampires. Just pile up the vampires early to raise the stakes.

The Incredible Hulk. So this guy gets annoyed and smashes things. Genius. Best role Tony Curtis ever played*.

Thor Ragnarok. Change of actors but it works – Mark Gruffalo does a passable Tony Curtis impression. The main thing is we go from vikings not in space with no explosions to vikings in space WITH explosions.

Black Panther: Da na na na na CATMAN! He’s a man, he’s a cat, he’s CATMAN! Oh, gosh! Can you see how these films just keep getting better and better! He’s a cat but he’s also a man. Because he is a man he’s stuck with having to be a gregarious social mammal instead of just hanging out by himself in a tree with a half-eaten gazelle. Can he manage to be both? Not quite so he fights another catman. Classic!

Infinity War: Oh my golly gosh! Check this out! Kirk Douglas is back and Mark Gruffalo and a bunch of people I don’t recognise. Black Panther is back, still thinking “Hey, I could be hanging out in a tree with a meaty carcase but I’m also a man and have to hang out with my extended family and friends like some kind of non-solitary apex predator” Emotional conflict drives character development. But oh look! He’s big, he wants to kill everybody because people are frickin’ annoying, he’s PURPLE! Yes, not the hero you people deserve but at long last a character I can almost identify with: FANOFF! He doesn’t have a cat face unlike Mr Panther but he’s got a cat personality. Who hasn’t sat out on the porch as the evening sunsets and thought “wouldn’t it be cool if I could just kill everybody?”

What’s next? Well, I think it is pretty obvious from who hasn’t turned up yet. In Part 2, Fanoff is like ‘OK, I saved the universe already. Now what?’ and then a whole bunch of vampires turn up! Fanoff then magics Blade back but he can’t travel in space, so fanos magics up Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “That’s you car now!” says Fanoff. “Thanks” says Blade, “But I can’t kill all these vampires by myself!” So Fanos waves his hand three times and says “abracadabra” and MEEE-OWW! Its catman himself BLACK PANTHER! And also Tony Curtis and Billy Joel** “Time to kick some vampire butt!” says Tony Curtis. “No, we should stab them instead!” says Blade and then they all fly off in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Billy Joel sings the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang song. THE END.

What’s an interval — an intermission? Is the intermission in Monty Python and the Holy Grail too short for it to be a perfect movie? (I remember seeing that in the theater, and people were just starting to get up to buy popcorn when the lights went back down and the movie resumed. It was classic.)

There was a particularly cruel intermission/interval in Grindhouse between Planet Terror and Deathproof where they showed the fictitious trailers. Ended up having to make a quick run to the restroom during the car chase scene in Deathproof.

Wikipedia has a list of “notable” movies with intermissions/intervals, but it doesn’t include Grindhouse.

During IW, the husband and I split one bottle of water between us so we wouldn’t have to run out, and we didn’t open it until over halfway through.

The old movies I mentioned above all had intermissions. But they were also single-theater road show type movies, where only one theater in a city had it, for several months. Not like nowadays where there are multiplexes everywhere and movies only play for a few weeks. Even in the early 80s, you still might have that pattern for really big movies. No more — gotta cram in as many showings a day as possible.

The employees who have to clean between showings must hate Marvel movies. They’ve got like 10 minutes to clean up all the floor gunk but they know nobody’s leaving till after the credits. They just lurk around the edges during the credits, brooms and dustpans at the ready.